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CUP: Gordon Not Happy with Top 3 at Darlington
Written by: Tom Jensen   
05/11/2008 - 12:47 AM
Darlington, S.C.
 
Jeff Gordon finished third inthe Dodge Challenger 500 at Darlington Raceway. (Chris Trotman/Getty Images Photo) ยป More Photos

The good news for Jeff Gordon was that he earned his fourth top-five finish of 2008 with a third-place run in Saturday night’s Dodge Challenger 500 at Darlington Raceway, finishing one position ahead of his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. and moving back into the top 10 in NASCAR Sprint Cup points.

The bad news was that race-winner Kyle Busch didn’t merely finish 9.395 seconds ahead of Gordon. No, Busch was in another zip code entirely, and at a track that Gordon has owned in the past, a place where Gordon has seven career victories and was the defending race winner.

And that did not sit well with Gordon, a four-time Sprint Cup champion. “I knew it was going to be very tough to pass,” said Gordon. “But
guys who had their cars working real good would be able to come up through there, like Carl (runner-up Edwards), and like Kyle when he went to the back. All we did was we started eighth. Two cars wrecked in front of us. We got to sixth. Somehow some track position worked out. We got in the top five. We just had awesome pit stops all night long. Because we did not have a car that could have driven from the back to the front.”

The point was that Gordon was good on Saturday night at Darlington, earning his best finish since a runner-up effort at Martinsville Speedway earlier this year. But Darlington is a track where Gordon and the No. 24 team expect to be great year in and year out, so a third-place finish was hardly a cause for rejoicing.

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